forgotten heroine of the _Newgate Calendar_. He was as eager to talk to
Hume the sceptic, or Wilkes the demagogue, as to the orthodox Tory,
Johnson; and, if repelled, it was from no deficiency in daring. In 1767,
he took advantage of his travels in Corsica to introduce himself to Lord
Chatham, then Prime Minister. The letter moderately ends by asking,
"_Could your lordship find time to honour me now and then with a
letter?_ I have been told how favourably your lordship has spoken of me.
To correspond with a Paoli and with a Chatham is enough to keep a young
man ever ardent in the pursuit of virtuous fame." No other young man of
the day, we may be sure, would have dared to make such a proposal to the
majestic orator.

His absurd vanity, and the greedy craving for notoriety at any cost,
would have made Boswell the most offensive of mortals, had not his
unfeigned good-humour disarmed enmity. Nobody could help laughing, or be
inclined to take offence at his harmless absurdities. Burke said of him
that he had so much good-humour naturally, that it was scarcely a
virtue. His vanity, in fact, did not generate affectation. Most vain men
are vain of qualities which they do not really possess, or possess in a
lower degree than they fancy. They are always acting a part, and become
touchy from a half-conscious sense of the imposture. But Boswell seems
to have had few such illusions. He thoroughly and unfeignedly enjoyed
his own peculiarities, and thought his real self much too charming an
object to be in need of any disguise. No man, therefore, was ever less
embarrassed by any regard for his own dignity. He was as ready to join
in a laugh at himself as in a laugh at his neighbours. He reveals his
own absurdities to the world at large as frankly as Pepys confided them
to a journal in cypher. He tells us how drunk he got one night in Skye,
and how he cured his headache with brandy next morning; and what an
intolerable fool he made of himself at an evening party in London after